The Real Threat of TikTok

It goes much deeper than a single app and its users' data.

TikTok is currently my favorite social media platform, and it has been since late 2019 when I started using it.

Also, TikTok should probably be banned by the United States government, removed from every mobile app store, and effectively shut down.

Both of these things are true, unfortunately. 

I absolutely love TikTok. It is my favorite social media platform right now because it so deftly impersonates my favorite social media platform of all time, Vine.¹ And I also think it is likely a genuine national security risk at scale and needs to be nixed from American smartphones.

However, I think that there is a much more real, much more subversive threat that we should be concerned about regarding TikTok. A threat that goes much deeper than TikTok. A threat whose effects I’m already seeing.

My Relationship With TikTok

Whenever I use TikTok, sometimes for far longer than I should or intend, I come away having spent my time laughing, learning, or otherwise being entertained and enlightened. I never come away from TikTok angry or upset in any way, which honestly cannot be said for my use of other social media platforms historically.²

I think that is part of the appeal of TikTok for a lot of people—it seems to be somehow less engineered to engage feelings of frustration or anger than other platforms. At least, that’s how I’ve trained my For You Page algorithm to operate. I am virtually never scrolling TikTok in the Following tab—I live in the For You Page, which is so contrary to how I use other social media platforms. Everywhere other than TikTok I only like to pay attention to the people I actually follow.³

My wife doesn’t use TikTok, so sometimes on a Friday night instead of watching a TV show or a movie I will AirPlay my phone screen to the TV screen and scroll through my liked TikToks so that she can get a laugh out of the ones I’ve kept in my virtual pocket to show her at some point. We laugh as much or more than we would watching some random TV show.

So, it’s fair to say I enjoy TikTok. I’ve grown my virtual cookbook ten-fold because of recipes I’ve gathered there. I’ve learned a few new workouts to do at the gym because of some tips I’ve seen on TikTok. I get some great laughs from there. 

But despite all of that, despite the great experience I have with the app personally, I know that there is real reason to believe it is a national security threat, and I agree that it should be banned as soon as possible. And back in January I predicted that it will be banned in the United States sometime this year. I still think that will happen, but I am not totally confident it will as the topic appears to be quite divisive...of course.⁴

TikTok and National Security: A Brief Overview

I’m not going to belabor this point too much because if you care about social media and national security you’ve probably already read 12 articles or watched five videos about TikTok and its potential national security threat. But let me quickly summarize.

TikTok is owned by parent company ByteDance, which is a Chinese company. In China, there are laws that allow the Chinese government to demand data from Chinese companies in secret and at any time. Such is life running a company based in a communist country that routinely oppresses its citizens at home and even abroad.

Countries around the world have been weighing a TikTok ban for years now, and in 2020, India, the new most populous country on the planet, actually banned the app from their country.

Likewise, there are real concerns that Chinese surveillance via TikTok is not only a threat, but a reality. The New York Times reported in March of this year:

The Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The investigation, which began late last year, appears to be tied to the admission in December by the company, ByteDance, that its employees had inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including that of two reporters and a few of their associates.

In the last half of March, TikTok Shou Zi Chew appeared before U.S. lawmakers and did his best to make the case for why they should not ban TikTok. He explained that there is a “firewall” in place between U.S. user data and the Chinese ByteDance operation, which he says would prevent the Chinese government from accessing it. 

Chew’s performance before Congress was generally regarded as sub-optimal—he didn’t seem to convince many lawmakers—but he has accumulated quite the following on TikTok, where he wasn’t very active before the hearing, and many TikTok users think he’s totally trustworthy and great…of course.

I have to say that I think Chew is very well-spoken and seems like a nice guy. I think he seems much more “normal” than some other tech CEOs who have appeared before Congress, but I also agree that it appears he didn’t do much to sway the members of Congress who grilled him in March.

Here’s the deal: Chew could totally be telling the truth. TikTok could have a sort of “data firewall” erected between U.S. user data and the Chinese government. That could be 100% true. 

The problem is that I’ve lived on the internet long enough to know that on a random Tuesday six months from now, the CEO of TikTok could release a statement saying, “Oops. The Chinese government actually found a way around our firewall six months ago and we just now figured it out. Sorry about that! We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again!” And we would never know if the Chinese government actually found a way in or if the door was opened for them, nor would we have any way to hold TikTok accountable moving forward, short of banning them.

TikTok is a massive national security threat, a sort of surveillance ticking time bomb that could explode at any moment. And we should ban it on that alone. 

But I actually think there is a more subversive threat from TikTok that has already borne fruit. Let’s get into that.

A More Subversive, Ignored TikTok Threat

Roger Wu is an employee of Texing, a Chinese tile manufacturer. On February 11, 2020, Roger posted a video to his YouTube account titled, “I'm Roger, a tile businessman from China.” In it, he mentions the novel coronavirus outbreak in China keeping him home from work, and he asks his viewers an existential question, “What is your dream?” The video has 70 views. 

In late 2021, I was scrolling TikTok and I came across the video of a man explaining what residential life is like in China. The TikToker was well-spoken, even if his English was a bit difficult to understand at times, and I found him to be charming and kind. I was first interested by the video because of recent news regarding China’s housing market collapse amid issues with Evergrande Group, one of China’s biggest residential developers.

@roger311In the next video, do you want to see a better community or a worse community?#community #China #apartment

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The video kept my attention because I realized that despite China’s dominance on the world stage, I hadn’t really ever considered what life is like there and how similar it may look to American life, at least on the surface. I had never seen inside a Chinese home, and the TikToker was showing me around one.

The guy recording the video was right: I had no idea what it was like to live in China, and he made me want to learn. So I followed him.

The man in the video that day was Roger Wu, and he has over 572,000 followers on TikTok—compare that to his 70 subscribers on YouTube!

The video above has over one million views. Every TikTok he posts these days gets tens if not hundreds of thousands of views.

I followed Roger immediately after watching that first video in 2021, and I regularly seek out his videos to see what he’s posting, and not just because I’m interested in Chinese culture. In fact, that’s not really why I go find Roger’s videos at all. 

I go to Roger’s videos to look at the comments. 

Just a collage of comments from various TikToks made by Roger Wu (@Roger311).

The collage of comments above is just a selection of what I’m talking about. It should be noted that I often come across a handful of comments pressing Roger about whether or not he is an operative of the Chinese government who has been assigned the task of making China look better than it actually is. 

I don’t know that I would go so far as to accuse Roger of being a hired operative of the Chinese government, but I would be lying to you if I said it hasn’t crossed my mind. Because it definitely has.

The point I’m trying to make here is this: I think there could be a much greater threat within (and beyond) TikTok than simple data-harvesting by the Chinese government—which, to be clear, is definitely a threat worth considering. I think the greater threat could be the Chinese government using a massively popular app like TikTok to seed and nurture positive sentiment for Chinese culture and China as a whole around the globe.⁵

Roger, notably, talks about how affordable goods are in China, and how rich the factory owners are, but seems to always avoid talking about the lack of workers rights and other less-than-shiny parts of the efficiencies and luxuries he celebrates. 

On top of guys like Roger within an app like TikTok, we should take note of broader trends in which Chinese companies are embedding themselves in American culture.

It’s So Much More Than TikTok and Data

The biggest app on the Apple App Store in the last few weeks has been an app called Temu, a shopping app that is owned by PDD Holdings, a Chinese e-commerce company that also owns Pinduoduo, a popular social commerce app in China. You may have seen Temu’s Super Bowl ad this year.

Likewise, consider one of the biggest video game companies in the world: Riot Games (developer of League of Legends, VALORANT, and others). Riot Games is 100% owned by Tencent, a Chinese technology company that is one of the most valuable companies in the world. In fact, Tencent is considered the largest video game company in the world, owning 84% of Supercell (the developer of Clash of Clans and other “Clash” games), 40% of Epic Games (the developer of Fortnite an the widely used Unreal Engine), and others. If you or a family member play any video games, you almost certainly play a Tencent-owned game on your phone, computer, or video game console.

So, here we have Tencent, Temu, and TikTok: three apps/companies dominating American culture in three different but overlapping spaces: video games, shopping, and entertainment.

You may see where I’m going here. 

Should we be concerned about whether or not TikTok is shoveling the data of U.S. TikTok users to the Chinese government, or that they will do so if compelled in the future? Absolutely. We should be concerned about that.

But what if something worse is happening as we speak?

What if, through creating popular apps, supporting pro-China creators, and owning a significant portion of the video game market, the Chinese government creates a fanbase among Americans and other Westerners such that they oppose their own government’s attempts curtail the influence of the Chinese Communist Party? 

What if we collectively fall so in love with the apps and creators and games and other forms influences that China creates for us that we happily give them our data and they don’t even really have to sneak it out in the metaphorical middle of the night through a software glitch or a security vulnerability that Chinese operatives just happen to exploit?

Sound scary? Well, I think it’s already happening. The Chinese government may not yet have troves of U.S. app users’ data, but it does seem to already have their hearts.

Sentiment toward the U.S. government banning TikTok among Americans, and especially TikTok users/creators, is not great. We love TikTok so much and hate our own government so much that many are sort of just giving the middle finger to the U.S. government’s feeble attempts at banning TikTok as we continue to scroll it.

Last week I asked my readers what they thought. One, named Chloe, said this in response to my question about whether or not the U.S. government would ban TikTok this year:

I do not think that the United States will ban TikTok in 2023 - I think it has become too big a part of the culture that there would be an outrage and folks would find a way to get around the ban anyway. 

I certainly see what she’s saying. There is a sense in which TikTok is already too much of an institution to get rid of it. And of course doggedly pursuing a ban of TikTok wouldn’t help with getting votes, especially among young people. 

But even beyond TikTok: what about Temu? It’s the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store right now! Does the government try to ban that, too?

What about Riot Games? It owns one of the biggest video games in the world in League of Legends, and one of the fastest-growing games in the world with VALORANT. There’s no way the U.S. bans those video games, but they are owned by the Chinese as much as TikTok is! And the anti-cheat software used in those video games to keep cheaters from ruining the experience has the ability to track processes on your computer at all times—far beyond the games themselves. This is…concerning! Banning TikTok doesn’t solve that problem!

Banning TikTok Is Smart, But Not a True Solution

So let me do my best to summarize my point by saying this: 

I think we ought to be more concerned about the cultural foothold being established by Chinese companies than we are about our data being passed to the Chinese Communist Party through TikTok. Because that is just one fruit of a much deeper root issue.

Banning TikTok is the right move, unfortunately, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that it really gets us any closer to freeing ourselves from the ongoing threat of China’s trojan horse infiltration of American culture via entertainment and convenience. 

As Postman once noted, Orwell was concerned about us being oppressed by something we hate. Huxley was concerned about us oppressing ourselves through our willing embrace of that which we love.

China does not need to forcibly invade our borders. We have already willingly let them into our pockets.

1. RIP Vine.

2. Looking at you, Twitter.

3. Or, in the case of Twitter, lists I’ve created.

4. How did I not see that coming?

5. Which, to be clear, I’m not anti-China in the sense that I’m anti-Chinese people or culture or anything like that. My concern with the injection of an appreciation for Chinese culture in the West isn’t with the people or the culture itself, but how our growing love for Chinese culture and media could be weaponized by the oppressive Chinese government.